Motor repairs and sailing against despair

After the “vacation sailing”, I took a day or two to do nothing in particular while waiting for the wind to go in the right direction. I spent some time geeking a bit when the weather wasn't nice, made a small sling, and started to learn how to use that… I missed my small folding bike from last year. It was much funnier to be in Marstal with a bike. I would have loved to be able to go to the other parts of the islands that I missed out on last year, but it wasn't really possible… Public transport in Marstal isn't really a thing.

Anyway, when the weather was perfect for me to go, I made a really not nice discovery… My engine wasn't starting at all. It was making a strange noise, and opening up the control panel didn't help me…

I asked a friend of mine who's spent some time in Marstal if she knew someone who could help me look at this, and she did! The next day, a mechanic came to have a look with me. We toiled the entire day, measured things here and there and couldn't really find what was wrong really… all we knew was that the starter wasn't getting enough power… it was getting 12V but not nearly enough amperes.

So, when Monday came around, I went round the maritime mechanics around Marstal to see who could come and help. The one who could the earliest came the next day. We spent most of it redoing what I had done with the other person before the mechanic decided the starter the problem. Turns out it wasn't, and it was actually the main switch that had a slight malfunction which was letting the electricity flow through but not enough…

After all that stress, I took a day to just chill out in Marstal, play some guitar and talk to my harbour neighbour, a nice German couple with a pretty Maxi sailboat. I had another engine scare when it was time to leave, but the issue was on the battery contact that wasn't tight enough…

A nice bunch of people was in the harbour for some of that time.

This time I couldn't go to the beach houses from last time but stayed at the one next to the harbour.

A bit jealous of this petrol lamp!

Time for some sailing at last! After all that, there was a short weather window to go North. Alas, most of the day would be spent waiting for some wind. It was quite frustrating to be going sluggishly north while there had been those two nice weather windows that I observed from Marstal without being able to go.

Once I passed the big bridge near Halsskov, the wind picked up a bit more than I was expecting and there was also a lot more traffic than I thought there would be… My original target was to go to Langør in Samsø, but it felt a bit too much to restart with. Instead, I tried to aim for Keterminde and to go shelter near the shore there, but I was taking too long and was a bit too much close-hauled to be comfortable. So instead I decided to go anchor near a small island: Musholm. I had hoped to go for a quick swim in the morning to clean a bit of the hull, but as I came closer and closer to this tiny island, I saw a group of fishing farms… I found a series of mooring buoys over there so I didn't even have to drop my anchor in the fish shit, which was quite pleasant. I also decided to skip the morning dip for the same reason 😅.

Going slowly downwind